> On Oct 1, 2014, at 8:50 AM, Benjamin Udell <bud...@nyc.rr.com> wrote: > > Maybe I've underestimated the amount of instrumentalism - it's hard for me to > discern how seriously people take their own ideas of 'useful fictions' in > practice.
And I should add my own important caveat. I’m simply not been in science for a long time now. Things can change rapidly. I’m more going by past conversations especially from when I worked at Los Alamos. There’s lots of ways my own experiences may not be representative of what’s going on. > Curiously, there seems more realism, more of an idea of finding the objective > truth about generals that relate waves/particles than about the singulars or > particulars, the waves/particles themselves (which are not particularly > individualistic anyway), especially when the objective truth about a given > wave/particle is supposed to be classical and observer-independent, not > quantum. Feynman's attitude seems to have been, give up trying to understand > it classically. One can imagine Peirce surveying the scene with an amused > glint in his eye. Not only was he a modal realist, he associated > individuality with falsity. I think this is right - although with waves the question becomes whether waves (or more accurately a quantum field) is the individual and not “particles” which are emergent. That is a place where I think all this gets tricky relative to nominalism. Often the divide between particulars and generals reverses in odd ways in fundamental physics. That can make discussion of nominalism tricky.
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